Quotes About Reflection

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour

Vielleicht sind gewisse meiner neulich ausgesprochenen Bedenken sehr übertrieben; so viel, wie ich mich kenne, scheint mir sicher, daß, wenn man mir meine Teufel austriebe, auch meinen Engeln ein kleinen, ein ganz kleiner (sagen wir) Schrecken geschähe, - und - fühlen Sie - gerade darauf darf ich es auf keinen Preis ankommen lassen.

How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year—, not only a season in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

Nous sommes en avant tout à fait comme des nostalgies. C'est au loin, dans des arrière-plans éclatants, qu'ont lieu nos épanouissements. C'est là que sont mouvement et volonté. C'est là que se situent les histoires dont nous sommes des titres obscurs. C'est là qu'ont lieu nos accords, nos adieux, consolation et deuil. C'est là que nous sommes, alors qu'au premier plan nous allons et venons.

If one think he can live without writing, perhaps he should not write at all.

But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone

Amint észrevettem, lehalkítottam lépteimet. Amikor a szegények gondolkoznak, nem szabad zavarni Å'ket. Talán mégiscsak eszükbe jut.

Don't petals of soft words float upon your blood?

I'm learning how to see. I don't know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don't know what happens there.

Moving Forward The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. It seems that things are more like me now, that I can see farther into paintings. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my sense, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.

C'est pourtant nous qui t'avons proposé de remplir ton calice. Enchantée de cet artifice, ton abondance l'avait osé. Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même en une seule fleur; c'est l'état de celui qui aime ... Mais tu n'as pas pensé ailleurs.

Seule, ô abondante fleur, tu crées ton propre espace; tu te mires dans und glace d'odeur. Ton parfum entoure comme d'autres pétales ton innombrable calice. Je te retiens, tu t'étales, prodigieuse actrice.

confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

We are the driven ones. But the march of time Is but a trifle In our perpetual enduring. All this hastening Will soon be done; For only lingering Can consecrate our being. Young men, don't throw Your energies into tests of Speed or aerial flight. Know that all is in repose: The darkness, the brilliantly luminous, The flower, the book

Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.

Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben

Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. (Letters on Life)

So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!